Caesar or Nothing Part 19

"Yes, give me it."

Caesar read the book, learned the intricacies of the game, and the next few evenings he acquitted himself so well that the Countess of San Martino marched off to her room with burning cheeks and almost in tears.

"What a cad you are!" Laura said to him at lunch some days later, laughing. "You are fleecing those women."

"It's their own fault. Why did they take advantage of my innocence?"

"They have decided to go and play in Carminatti's room without telling you."

"I'm glad of it."

"Do you know, _bambino_, I have to go away for a few days."

"Where?"

"To Naples. Come with me."

"No; I have things to do here. I will take you to the station."

"Ah, you rascal! You are a Don Juan."

"No, dear sister. I am a financier."

"I can see your victims from here. But I shall put them on their guard.

You are a blood-thirsty hyena. You like to collect hearts the way the Red-skins did scalps."

"You mean coupons."

"No, hearts. You like to pretend to be simple, because you are wicked. I will tell the Countess Brenda and her daughter."

"What are you going to tell them?"

"That you are wicked, that you have a hyena's heart, that you want to ruin them."

"Don't tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies."

"You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me."

"Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?"

"A little more cream and a little less impertinence, _bambino_," said Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.

Caesar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with Preciozi.

The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Caesar would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.

Caesar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the ineffable reigned.

Caesar, who hadn't much faith in the ineffable, used to listen to her with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a visionary incapable of understanding reality.

In the daytime Caesar went walking with Preciozi and they talked of their respective plans.

_SOLITARY WALKS_

Often Caesar went out alone, chewing the end of his thoughts as he strolled in the streets, working out possible schemes of investments or of politics.

When he got away from the main streets, he kept finding some corner at every step that left him astonished at its fantastic, theatrical air.

Suddenly he would discover himself before a high wall, on top of which were statues covered with moss, or huge terra-cotta jars. Those decorations would stand out against the dark foliage of the Roman ilex and the tall, black cypresses. At the end of a street would rise a tall palm, drooping its branches over a little square, or a stone pine, like the one in the Aldobrandini garden.

"These people were real artists," Caesar would murmur, and mean it as a fact, not taking it for either praise or blame.

His curiosity got excited, despite his determination not to resemble a tourist in any way. The low windows of a palace would let him see lofty ceilings with great stretches of painting, or decorated with medallions and legends; a balcony would display a thick curtain of ivy that hid the railings; here he would read a Latin inscription cut in a marble tablet, there he would come upon a black lane between two old houses, with a battered lantern at its entrance. In the part of town between the Corso and the Tiber, which is full of narrow, crooked old streets, he loved to wander until he was lost.

Some details already familiar, he was delighted to see again; he always halted to look down the Via della Pillotta, with its arches over the street; and the little flower-market in the Piazza di Spagna always gave him a sensation of joy.

At dusk Caesar would walk in the centre of town; the bars filled up with people who loved to take cakes and sweet wine; on the sidewalks the itinerant merchants cried their trifling wares; along the Corso a procession of carriages full of tourists pa.s.sed rapidly, and a few well-appointed victorias came driving back from the Pincio and the Villa Borghese.

Once in a while Caesar went out in the evening after dinner. There was scant animation in the streets, theatres didn't interest him, and he would soon return to the hotel salon to chat with the Countess Brenda.

Later, in his room, he would write to Alzugaray, giving him his impressions.

IX. NEW ACQUAINTANCES

"I PROTESTANTI DELLA SIMPATiA"

It began again to rain disastrously; the days were made up of downpours and squalls, to the great despair of the foreigners.

At night the Piazza Esedra was a fine sight from the hotel balcony. The arc lights reflected their glow in the lakes of rain beneath them, and the great jet of the fountain in the centre took on tones of blue and mother-of-pearl, where the rays of the electric light pierced through it.

In the hotel parlour one dance followed another. Everybody complained gaily of the bad weather.

Shortly before the middle of Lent there arrived a Parisian family at the hotel, composed of a mother with two daughters and a companion.

This family might be considered a representation of the _entente cordiale_. The mother was French, the widow first of a Spaniard, Senor Sandoval, by whom she had had one daughter, and then of an Englishman, Mr. Dawson, by whom she had had another.

Mme. Dawson was a fat, imposing lady, with tremendous brilliants in her ears and somewhat theatrical clothes; Mile. Sandoval, the elder daughter, was of Arab type, with black eyes, an aquiline nose, pale rose-coloured lips, and a malicious smile, full of mystery, as if it revealed restless and diabolical intentions.

Her half-sister, Mile. Dawson, was a contrast, being the perfect type of a grotesque Englishwoman, with a skin like a beet, and freckles.

The governess, Mile. Cadet, was not at all pretty, but she was gay and sprightly. These four women seated in the middle of the dining-room, a little stiff, a little out of temper, seemed, particularly the first few days, to defy anybody that might have wished to approach them. They replied coolly to the formal bows of the other guests, and none of them cared to take part in the dances.

The handsome Signor Carminatti shot incendiary glances at Mlle. de Sandoval; but she remained scornful; so one evening, as the Dawson family came out of the dining-room, the Neapolitan waved his hand toward them and said: